Matters of Blood and Connection
by Xyliette
Summary: Meredith and George discuss dads over a bottle of tequila. Set sometime Season 4. One shot.


A/N: Prompt 3/6 and I was really excited about this one because it is vastly different than what I normally do. These are not two characters I write often so advanced apologies if I have screwed up their traits too greatly. I do hope that it is acceptable as it is my first ever visit into the head of Meredith, so let me know how crazy I got here. Title is from Dashboard Confessional and I don't know...it just works. Enjoy-**_-----_**

There are few things in this world that Meredith Grey wishes she had…because she's just simply not that type of person. She doesn't feed off of expensive gifts and the personal accumulation of random stuff. She's a-okay with her dirty laced converse sneakers and plain lavender conditioner. What Meredith has learned is that wanting things will slap you in the face, so she steers clear. She makes do with the little she's given and yet somehow still manages to throw on a smile for the sickened crowds. She gets her kicks not on correct answers or self inflation but on the ability to make people better.

Sometimes she feels bad for herself, sometimes she allows days for staying in bed because the world really is crashing down but most of the time she just feels bad. At one point during med school she considered anti depressants for all of two seconds knowing full well that normal people do not live like this, normal people do not have these issues. Instead she took a break, she realigned, she stuck her head in a book and she pulled it together because she had no one caring but her.

Sometimes she wishes someone loved her unconditionally.

**_-----_**

She slams a shot back and feels her body begin to loosen up. She's come to understand, though not by choice, that her father is kind of a raging alcohol…hold the kind of. So she views George (who is stuck here because everyone else is working) with glassy eyes, mentally noting that she is not going there tonight, and reaches for the bottle again. George needs a shoulder, George has made a fucking mess, George is sad but George is determined and she kind of admires that about him. That after losing his dad and failing his exam, screwing over his wife, that he still chose to stick it out and put his best foot forward…she gets that. So she's here drinking silently and waiting for him to break because if you spend enough time around people they'll tell you things that you never in a million years wanted to know and she has a feeling that that is where tonight is headed.

"He's gone." He says it like an afterthought. It's not a question or a statement, it simply is. It stands alone.

Meredith pauses because George hasn't talked about Harold O'Malley since the funeral. George hasn't said one word, he hasn't cracked an eye in the direction of having a breakdown but Meredith knows, she's seen it many times and lived through it more than she wants to count. "I know." She shrugs and hands him the tequila while shuffling so her back is up against the couch and her legs are jutting straight out under the coffee table. The house is eerily silent with missing bodies and suddenly she yearns for someone else to be home because this could get awkward quick, fast and in a hurry.

"It's just- he was here one day and now he's not." He shakes his head and she knows what he knows. He isn't merely talking about his father. He's talking about his marriage, his career. His life. It was here and now it's not. She can sympathize with that and she can drink to that. She does the latter.

"Yeah." She can't understand losing a father. She never really had one. There are technicalities and DNA but Thatcher was never anything more than a sperm donor and for most of her life Meredith's been just fine on her own but sometimes…sometimes the little voice in her head pipes up and reminds her of how nice it would be to have a father figure; to have someone who would've have fought for blonde haired pigtailed Meredith like there was no tomorrow.

Sometimes she wishes that she had the impossible. The thing so many people are given without thinking it could be another way.

She brushes it off because that's not her story.

"Sucks." He discards his glass, sliding it with his forearm to the rug below him before taking a hit off the bottle and rolling his neck. He's certainly not one for commiserating but Meredith is always so inviting that he can't help but try and divert some of his problems.

"Life sucks." She corrects. And it does. It bestows things and people and then snatches them away without second thought to the once owner's feelings. It wrenches beating hearts and fucks with minds until there's nothing left but a shell of a person yearning for everything that could have been…everything that would have been…if only. She doesn't know who to blame anymore, for any of it, she's just tired. "We can play a game."

"Yeah?"

"It's called whose life sucks the most and I almost always win." There was that one time with Cristina but it's been months since that and she is currently back atop her pedestal as Queen of all the horrible shit that can happen to one person.

"You can't beat me." George mutters lifting up the now empty glass bottle and reminding himself before he gets terribly cloudy that he should not sleep with Meredith tonight…or Izzie.

"Maybe."

"Doubt it. You've got a dad and a McDreamy and a job."

She twists her mouth in thought. If one were to look at it that way it's kind of simple. It appears to be good on the outside but on the inside it's pitch black and ice cold and she's tired of freezing and not being able to see. "I almost drowned." It's kind of old news but it may still work.

"Correction, you almost got away with killing yourself." His head spins and the brain to mouth filter is missing and suddenly George is saying all of the things that everyone has been trying to tell her for months but is too afraid. "And you've got McDreamy trying to marry you and you're scared…scared of what I don't know…it's not like he's got more wives coming out of closets…you won that round…it's not like you are stuck with all the interns all over again…it's not like everything you know…everything you've worked for has been yanked out from underneath you by your own hand."

Actually it is a little like that but to hell with it if she's going to cop to it. Now is not the time. She wants to live in the world where it is excusable to silently keep blaming Derek for Addison ruining them (even though she really has little to do with the whole situation) and keep blaming Thatcher on Lexie (although he was her father first) and keep on being afraid because she can't let her own guard down for once. Sane people, people like good ol' George two feet from her do not fair well with these odds. They aren't strong enough and she knows it's just a waiting game. "Derek's…Derek…and he doesn't want to marry me…he just wants…I don't know…I don't know!"

"He wants you."

"He wants a version of me…I don't know the person he wants." She falls silent quickly and he takes to playing with the vibrant tangled strings falling out of the rug. Ten minutes pass and it feels like twenty. She thinks that if she could stand she would wobble to the kitchen and find more liquor but they don't need it…and they both work tomorrow and last year taught her to be slightly more careful…or maybe she doesn't want to be Thatcher. Maybe it's none of it and she feels lazy, whatever the cause she isn't getting up and he's starting to laugh. It's like watching a ticking time bomb and the fuse is getting ready to explode.

She watches as his chuckle catches in his throat and his jovial laughter turns to gut retching gasps of pain. He tries to hold back the tears but it's to no avail because he's plastered and angry at everyone and no one for taking his favorite person and leaving his world in shattered pieces of colored glass that fuse together with every wrong mistake; every incorrect step down the wrong path. Meredith scoots over and pulls his head down to her shoulder. She's not the best with words but she can give a mean hug in the way of support.

"He's gone." George chokes out spilling salty wetness onto Meredith's ratty college shirt. He inhales her hair and almost gags as she sweeps it off her shoulder and out of his way. "She's gone. It's all gone, I have ruined everything."

"You haven't ruined anything George. Maybe Callie was never supposed to be your wife and maybe this year will be good for you and then you'll be a resident like the rest of us (that is if Izzie doesn't get any crazier and if Hahn doesn't kill Cristina in her sleep) and it will be good. Things will get better." She doesn't know where she gets off on preaching but he stops suddenly, wipes at his cheeks impishly and recoils.

"Can't get any worse." He pushes three more feet in between the two as Alex walks through the front door. He lets it slam and doesn't give a second glance to the pair on the floor before stomping upstairs.

"Not really." She grins feeling the warm sensation burn through her lips and tongue.

"I miss him."

"Me too." They speak of different people but the pain is the same.

Heartbreak is universal.

Sometimes Meredith wishes she had a father. Sometimes she wishes Thatcher (she wishes his name was Dad and not Thatcher) could look her dead in the eye and say why he didn't fight but she always knew the reason. They weren't enough. On her best day she wasn't what was going to keep him around and it never had much to do with her but that doesn't make it hurt any less.

Other times she is almost bitterly glad that she doesn't have that relationship with anyone, the kind like George had with his dad. The warm, fuzzy, 'my father is a superhero and nothing will ever happen to me when he is around' thing because Meredith can't stand to lose one more person who cares about her.

Her deck is rapidly running out of cards and she knows that if Harold O'Malley was her father she wouldn't have been nearly as brave or as strong as George has been. Moving two feet to the left she silently pulls him back into the embrace and hugs him for everything.

For his pain; for hers.

For the missing dad that he'll never get back; for the imaginary father that she never had to begin with.

**_-----_**

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End file.
